Robert Landy's role therapy method promotes the concept that “as role takers and role players, people become a cast of characters unto themselves and stumble toward ways to live among the contradictory pulls of their personae.” (Landy, 1994) Landy's role therapy method involves a number of treatment steps, including invoking, naming and exploring a role, and developing both function and alternative qualities in the form of sub-roles through puppet and mask work in an extended dramatization. This process incorporates role reflection whereby clients reflect upon quality and function of roles and relate the fictional roles to their everyday life. The distance of the role affords clients the safety to play out issues through these fictional roles. Improvised enactments, as well as projective techniques, offer clients the space to explore and move through roles; new roles can be recognized and previously denied roles acknowledged.
Landy's method provides the means to understand role in a system of organization or taxonomy. His taxonomy is a classification system of the recurring roles throughout the history of western dramatic literature. This taxonomy is a systematic arrangement of role type according to function, quality and style presentation. (Landy, 1994)
According to Landy: “Clients who are able to invoke and name roles, to play them out and reflect upon them as parts of themselves, would be well within the normal range of functioning. Any significant deviation from this would indicate a truncated role system” (Landy, 1994).
Applicants offer an assessment instrument and treatment tool in the form of their enactment board game, ROLE THE DICE. ROLE THE DICE seeks to access a client's (or player's) current internal role repertoire evidenced by a series of spontaneous role play enactments, specified by role type, quality, and style presentation, and substantiated by self-reported reflection. Applicants employ improvisation as a projective means to give rise to one's role system and view the realm of play to be the ideal non-threatening place where creativity and exploration are honored. In this locale, ROLE THE DICE weds game playing with spontaneous improvisation to facilitate the exploration of role. The therapeutic goals of ROLE THE DICE are both intra- and interpersonal. As a therapeutic treatment tool, ROLE THE DICE desires to enhance communication and increases socialization among group members.